Sir, I am a dental core trainee (DCT) and rotate around different hospitals regularly. This means that I meet new people every few months. All of my DCT years have been during the COVID-19 pandemic and within the period of compulsory mask-wearing. Over the last few weeks, as the need for mask-wearing has reduced, I have seen people's entire faces for the first time. These are faces of people I have seen, worked with, bonded with daily for four months, but I have often found myself surprised that their faces are not what I had visualised in my mind's eye once their mask has been removed.
Isn't it interesting that we paint a picture of what we think the lower third of an individual's face 'should' look like? I wonder if we link this to their personality, or do we have a 'one size fits all' golden proportion?
A recent research experiment found that individuals were perceived to be more attractive with the lower half of their face covered than without. They suggested that this was linked to the indication of professionalism and responsibility, and that people feel safer around an individual wearing a mask.1
As dentists, we are all familiar with the term 'golden proportions' in relation to dental and facial aesthetics, but do we apply this golden proportion to faces which are partly covered? It has been shown that individual attractiveness is optimised when the face's vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth is approximately 36% of its length,2 and that the mouth and eye regions are among the most important sources of information supporting facial identification.3
Studies into the cognitive abilities to 'fill in gaps' of images where part of the image has been covered suggest that when direct input from the eye is obstructed, the brain predicts what is most likely to be present behind the object, by using some of the other inputs to come up with best 'guesses'4 - is this what we do with faces behind masks?
References
- 1.Hies O, Lewis M B. Beyond the beauty of occlusion: medical masks increase facial attractiveness more than other face coverings. Cogn Res Princ Implic 2022; doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00351-9. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
- 2.Pallett P M, Link S, Lee K. New 'golden' ratios for facial beauty. Vision Res 2010; 50: 149-154. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed]
- 3.Gosselin F, Schyns P G. Bubbles: a technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vision Res 2001; 41: 2261-2271. [DOI] [PubMed]
- 4.Smith F W, Muckli L. Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2010; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1000233107. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed]